Abstract

Abstract»Know the Ways!« On the occasion of Hildegard's of Bingen 900th birthday. Hildegard is regarded as one of the most important women of the Middle Ages. Her contemporaries from all over the world wrote letters to her searching for help and prayer. Universilary working she wrote works about medicine, natural history, compositions of chants for the honour of God and his creation and more than three hundred letters to people all over the world including the popes and the emperor. Hildegard's work and the way she understood herself were strongly marked by vision and prophecy. Her works were of divine origin by vision and audition. Her aim was the religious interpretation of the whole universe and a Christian life in the sense of the bible. Heaven and earth, faith and natural science, medicine and religion, the human existence in all its facts and potentials, everything was a mirror of divine love to her. In her first work Scivias („Know the Ways”︁) she is considering on the history of creation and salvation, from the origin of the world and of man over Christ's salvation to the fulfillment at the end of times. In the centre is standing the human being as microcosm reflecting the whole world in all conditions and laws. Man is the main work of god, reflecting in his doing and thinking God's love. Man has to know the ways that means to live the life of love in all consequences including reproduction by creating a new human being for the praise of God.